Proposals to let the Colorado River run around the Glen Canyon Dam were once dismissed as environmentalist wishcasting. Those ideas don’t seem quite so “looney” any longer.
A group of environmentalists plotted the restoration of Glen Canyon before it looked like a strong possibility. Glen Canyon Institute executive director Erik Balken compares the "Cathedral in the Desert" in Clear Creek Canyon with photos in a historical photo journal of Glen Canyon, on Monday, May 17, 2021.
David Brower sat back in his chair during the first board meetings of the Glen Canyon Institute in 1996 — white-haired, distinguished and almost entirely silent. Three decades earlier, when Brower was head of the Sierra Club, he had been instrumental in preventing the Grand Canyon from turning into a series of back-to-back reservoirs, and he had forged the modern American environmental movement in the process. But Brower never stopped regretting his decision to not fight against the Glen Canyon Dam, which is why the 84-year-old activist had agreed to join the board of the newly formedBrower would listen for hours as the suggestions flew back and forth across the table about how the Salt Lake City-based organization could best achieve its goal of allowing Lake Powell to drain and restoring a free-flowing river through Glen Canyon, recalled Wade Graham, who has served on the Glen Canyon Institute board since its founding. Then Brower would lean forward and utter a sentence or two. With just a few carefully chosen words, Graham said, Brower would reset the entire conversation. “This is going to be a multigenerational battle,” Graham recalls Brower saying in one of those pithy statements. “I’m not going to live to see it, you’re not going to live to see it, but if we lay the groundwork now, we can bring back Glen Canyon someday.” LaGorce Arch in Davis Gulch near Lake Powell once provided passage for jet skis when the reservoir was higher. May 5, 2022. The institute’s proposals did feel like a long shot in the late 1990s when Lake Powell was filled to its capacity. The Glen Canyon Dam was functioning as intended. It was storing years of the Colorado River’s average annual flow, producing reliable hydropower, blocking sediment from filling Lake Mead downstream and creating a sprawling houseboaters paradise that was visited by millions of people annually.“one of the most egregious errors of the last century.”“It was like a pillar of civilization somehow,” Graham said. “Nearly the entire environmental movement in the West had already accommodated itself to the status quo.”Richard Ingebretsen, a physician who founded Glen Canyon Institute, remembers picking up a copy of The Salt Lake Tribune at a gas station in 1997. AThen-Sen. Orrin Hatch called the idea “looney” in the article. “People just laughed at us,” Ingebretsen said. “I was on the news a lot, and I was traveling around and speaking a lot. People were aghast.”But Ingebretsen said he never got over his disdain for the reservoir that drowned Glen Canyon and over 90 side canyons, several of which he had first explored as a Boy Scout in the early 1960s. On that first trip, one of the leaders pointed to a cleft in the rock more than 100 of feet overhead and said it would one day provide passage for jetboats. “I remember thinking, ‘That is bad. Why are they flooding this?’” Ingebretsen said. “It bothered me.” By the time he first floated Cataract Canyon as a young man, the reservoir was full. Seeing the transition between roaring rapids and placid stillwater made him livid. Richard Ingebretsen, founder and president of the Glen Canyon Institute, under the LaGorce arch in Davis Gulch on a trip on Lake Powell on May 10, 2003. Landmarks which had previously been submerged in Glen Canyon are now becoming visible with the lower water levels in Lake Powell. “It broke my heart,” he recalls. Ingebretsen laid the groundwork for starting Glen Canyon Institute and arrangedbetween Brower and infamous Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, one of the dam’s biggest boosters. Hundreds of people showed up to watch the old rivals make their case, but in the broader community, the argument for draining Lake Powell was still largely seen as environmentalist wish casting.When Brower died in 2000, however, the big winter storms of the 1990s failed to materialize over the Rocky Mountains and Glen Canyon Institute began to find a new role: encouraging water managers to plan for prolonged drought. Jeri Ledbetter, a river guide in the Grand Canyon who took over as executive director of the institute during those years, said all of the public planning from the Bureau of Reclamation and other agencies was about what to do with surplus water. “Nobody in any position of authority,” she said, “wanted to come up with any criteria for what we’d do in the event [of serious drought].” Ledbetter and her colleagues also found they had to also run a basic public education campaign around the history of the 180-mile reservoir. She remembers receiving one angry letter from a Utahn who had seen the Glen Canyon Institute proposal to drain Lake Powell by drilling bypass tunnels and letting the river flow around the base of the dam.“There were a lot of people that really didn’t know that it’s a human-made feature,” Ledbetter said.Graham and Peterson, who took over as director of the Glen Canyon Institute after Ledbetter, uncovered an inscription left by the reservoir’s namesake, John Wesley Powell, in 1871. It had been exposed by dropping reservoir levels and was buried by a few inches of mud, yet when Graham and Peterson located the rock and swept away the dirt, there it was, exposed to the daylight. Peterson, like most observers at that time, assumed that the low reservoir levels would be short-lived and that the new revelations would be covered again. “Everybody knew it as the ‘jewel of the Colorado,’” he said, referring to the name given to Lake Powell by Dominy. “It was a filled-up, beautiful blue reservoir against red walls with a tiny bathtub ring at best for most of the time.”A series of relatively wet winters brought the reservoir level back up, and for a brief time, it looked as if the drought could be breaking. But climate scientists were projecting a much grimmer future for the Colorado River Basin. Eric Balken, who has been executive director of Glen Canyon Institute since 2015, began working at the organization as an intern soon after he graduated from high school.findings of a 2008 paper from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that looked at increasing water demand in the Upper Colorado River Basin and models that projected lower runoff due to climate change. “It was a total bombshell of a paper,” he said. “It said that based on the climate data that they had, Lake Mead and Lake Powell could easily dry up in the decades to come and that, if nothing else, they would most likely be mostly empty most of the time.” In retrospect, those findings have proven prescient. Both Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, are at their lowest levels since they were first filled and it’s unlikely they’ll ever fill again. The Glen Canyon Dam is on the verge of losing its ability to generate power, and the Bureau of Reclamation recently expressed concerns that allowing the reservoir to drop further could cause significant damage to the lowest outlet works in the dam. For years, Balken, Ingebretsen and others have been encouraging Reclamation and water managers to prepare for this day. They’ve long argued that adding new tunnels at the base of the dam would add much-needed flexibility from a water management position, including the option to store Lake Powell’s water in Lake Mead and increase hydropower production on the Nevada reservoir. Those ideas don’t seem quite so “looney” any longer, though federal agencies have given little indication that such a plan is being actively considered.The Glen Canyon Dam could stop producing electricity in the next year or two, eventhe Department of Interior announced last month. When that happens, Balken said the reservoir will start to become more of a liability than an asset to providing Colorado River water to the 40 million people in and around the basin who rely on it. And if Lake Powell drops below the dam’s hydropower intakes, it will become extremely difficult to manage from a recreation standpoint. The reservoir level will swing more dramatically the lower it gets, and it could begin to shift by more than 100 vertical feet in a year. All but one of Lake Powell’s boat ramps are currently closed and the topography of the landscape makes it difficult to extend them. “So you sort of lose the recreational benefits and you lose the hydropower benefits,” Balken said of the worst-case scenario for the future of Lake Powell. “And then most importantly, at a certain point, the Upper Basin states aren’t able to meet their delivery obligations and the Grand Canyon is going to suffer from that flow regime.” What water managers should be doing, in Balken’s mind, is what Glen Canyon Institute has been calling for decades. “The best-case scenario is that the agencies take seriously this idea of phasing out the reservoir,” he said, meaning the installation of bypass tunnels at the base of the dam. “Whether we like it or not, some version of this is most likely coming. … We have to start planning for that, even if it’s not certain.” Balken added that those discussions should include tribal governments in the region, which were excluded from the decision to construct the dam.Colorado River management decisions are complex and the challenges are enormous, Balken acknowledged, but more people are recognizing the value of the places that have been revealed as Lake Powell’s level has plummeted. Lake Powell Resorts and Marinas, which provides boat rental services on the reservoir, has started advertising places like Gregory Natural Bridge and Cathedral in the Desert, two famous features near the Escalante River that were covered with water until recently. “There are many examples where current conditions provide guests with a unique opportunity to discover natural landscapes and formations,” the company wrote a recent email to guests. Graham, vice president of Glen Canyon Institute’s board, and Peterson, an artist who was the institute’s former director, visited Cathedral in the Desert with The Salt Lake Tribune earlier this month, the same day Balken was touring the feature with a film crew from CBS.
Please follow us on Google to support us United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Salpointe Catholic fends off rally by Canyon del Oro to secure fourth straight Class 4A championshipSalpointe Catholic jumped out to a 9-2 lead before CDO rallied to make it 9-7. The Lancers later got a key home run from pitcher Gianna Mares and won 10-7.
Read more »
New Mexico battling historic blaze as Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire 26% containedThe Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire has grown to over 299 acres.
Read more »
Environmentalists oppose possibility of extending the life of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power PlantDozens of environmental and anti-nuclear organizations expressed opposition to any attempt to extend the life of California's last operating nuclear power plant.
Read more »
Teen dies after cliff jumping at Texas lake, officials sayA 16-year-old died Monday after cliff jumping at Lake Georgetown over the weekend.
Read more »
Environmentalists oppose possibility of extending the life of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power PlantDozens of environmental and anti-nuclear organizations expressed opposition to any attempt to extend the life of California's last operating nuclear power plant.
Read more »
How 'Twin Peaks: The Return' Failed Audrey HorneJust what exactly happened to Audrey Horne, the bold, audacious girl from 25 years ago?
Read more »